


a conqueror's eyes

by ncfan



Series: The Golden Age of Konoha: The Founders [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-03
Packaged: 2017-12-04 04:53:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/706778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A child is born in the depths of winter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a conqueror's eyes

In the year of 2452, the Uchiha make their camp along the banks of the Nakano, their ancestral lands, for the winter. The most recent of their clashes with the Senju was over and done with a few months ago, without a decisive victor—no matter how it went, what they need is time to regroup, lick their wounds, and recover their strength. Given that the Nakano is teeming with fish, and that the last time the river froze was before presently-living memory, the riverbank was as good a location as any.

The Uchiha have a saying: children born in winter do not thrive. A child of the Uchiha clan is supposed to be born with fire in their soul, and how can that be so when they are born at the coldest, darkest time of the year? And besides, even for a great clan, winter is lean-time, harsh and unforgiving. So most Uchiha children are born in spring and summer, and those born in winter are not expected to live to see spring.

On the twenty-fourth of December, a brutal snowstorm hits central Hi no Kuni, striking the Uchiha camp like—or so the elders think—the judgment of God. All of the members of the clan, along with their servants, gather in the central tents, where the fires burn bright and hottest.

And on this day, a woman of the clan goes into labor.

She is not the clan head’s wife, nor is she his lover. She’s not a member of the Main family. She comes from one of the cadet branches, but she and her husband are both fell warriors, so the clan head sends one of his serving women, a midwife, to assist the woman in her labor.

The woman’s son comes into the world drenched in his mother’s blood and howling. At birth he is possessed of lustful hunger and latches on to his mother’s breast at the earliest opportunity. By all accounts, he is healthy, but the woman is not optimistic. She has already had two stillborn daughters, and another who did not survive her first month. All were winter births.

For the boy’s mother, as winter rages on all the world seems to hold its breath. As is the custom, she does not yet give her child a name, and she spends the rest of December and all of January dreading the inevitable morning when she will wake up to find the baby dead in his bassinet beside her.

But he does not die.

He does not die in December, nor in January. February comes and the snows stop and the world melts. She takes her son out of the tent, into the outside world for the first time, and he blinks his eyes, still infant-blue, irritably against the sun. He has a conqueror’s eyes, the woman thinks. Bold and strong, not the eyes of a child who will be lost to crib-death.

On that day, the woman of the Uchiha clan gives her son a name. She calls him Madara.


End file.
